It’s all but silly to have modern balance expectations for a fighting game like Super Smash Bros. Melee that’s approaching being a quarter century old. Indeed a far more interesting approach might consider why the game has maintained interest at a competitive level despite having such clear follies.
It just so happens that Turndownforwalt’s latest video examines this peculiar truth by looking at a single move from a single play from the incredible grand finals of Super Smash Con 2023.
The move in question is Jigglypuff’s Rest, one of the game’s four one-frame start up attacks that does a whopping 28% damage with its single hit, but also leaves Puff asleep and thus completely open to any and all punishes if she whiffs it.
No real issues thus far as it seems developers were careful enough to attach an appropriate amount of risk to this clearly high-reward maneuver, but as Turndownforwalt digs into the particulars of frame data and situational happenings, we begin to see why this move (and Melee as a whole) can be surprisingly inconsistent.
The grand finals of Super Smash Con 2023 was played between Liquid|Hungrybox (Jigglypuff) and MM|Zane (Marth) and came to a photo finish conclusion. As with most sequences in Melee, about 10,000 things happened all in the span of two seconds, but the breakdown reveals just how interesting the 10k simultaneous happenings are… even to non-Smash Bros. players.
Without going too far into it, we’ll say we’re even more amazed at the complexity of this 23 year old game. Give Walt’s video a watch below and then let us know in the comments if you have a new appreciation for Melee (for better or worse) afterwards.